Here’s another time-lapsed look at a Chinese Gucci collage as it was made. The pre-sale of the special editions goes wide on 30 September 2018, just a week or so away.

Here’s a couple of scorching-hot new blurbs:

Somewhere between a Harmony Korine film and a Tao Lin novel, Chinese Gucci is a book about desire and greed and being too spoiled to figure out your dreams. It’s a book about being alive in the 21st century and maybe what all our futures will look like—buying and selling and gaming and drinking and drugging. Nights in Mexico. Days on the computer. Forgetting the difference between what’s real and fake. The edges on this novel are sharp enough to cut the reader’s throat. Filled with text messages and prose as clean as the best dirty realists, Chinese Gucci is a novel filled with characters no one wants, characters who do despicable things, characters who most of us are, and we all need to read it.

— Dave Newman, author of The Poem Factory and Two Small Birds

Chinese Gucci, in the embodiment of Akira Nakimura, is a fantastically written desolate portrait of today’s rootless youth navigating this inverted totalitarian, tech-junkied, consumerist piece of steaming shit called America that has smugly sat its fat, racist, rotting lilly white ass on stolen land for over two hundred and forty years.

The first thing I want novels to do is entertain. Ask the Dust. Post Office. Hangover Square. All terrific. I smile as the pages flip.

And after that, I want them to make me think...call it novels as cultural criticism. It makes for a pretty fascinating lens to read a yarn through. Beyond the narrative, Catcher in the Rye can be seen as post-war distrust of "traditional American values," or a rally-cry of individualism in the face of conformity; Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath as an anti-capitalistic screed; To Kill a Mockingbird as the not-so-color-blind scales of "justice"; On the Road as the bellwether for the American counterculture; The Sun Also Rises as a study of PTSD and the wounded masculinity of life post-war.

So, without overplaying my novel's hand too much, let me just say that THIS INTRIGUING ARTICLE has much to do with some of the underpinnings in what I hope is Chinese Gucci’s subtle cultural critique. It was a pleasant surprise, moving from draft to draft – learning that I’d started out writing about someone fake, only to discover just how much it all had to do with me personally and my life’s experiences. See, when I first tried writing novels, I figured you just made up a bunch of stuff.

Not so.

If you're doing it right, I now think there’s no way to avoid writing about yourself. Hopefully not in an obvious way – as the characters in the book are nothing like me. And yet: there is something familiar in all of them...something my Jungian shadow responds to, those rusty little hooks hiding in the subconscious! Novels are nothing if not an extraordinary vehicle for both learning about ourselves, and for exacting revenge in some literary way! On the surface, hopefully it’s a story that is unique and surprising enough to keep you turning pages – and beneath that, a deep, cold ocean. Think of it as a long-form debunking of all those lousy things about the world that I’ve foolishly always hoped I could fix!